Did Twitter’s Removal of Government and State-Affiliated Media Labels Expand the Influence of State Actors?
Digital Democracy Workshop
University of Zurich
October 27, 2023
“Unlike independent media, state-affiliated media frequently use their news coverage as a means to advance a political agenda. We believe that people have the right to know when a media account is affiliated directly or indirectly with a state actor” (Twitter, 2020).
Sources: Internet Archive, Twitter
Russian interference in the US 2016 election
(Golovchenko et al. 2020; Ross, Vaccari, and Chadwick 2022)
Chinese influence operations and Xinjiang
(DiResta et al. 2021)
Iranian involvement in anti-Saudi discourse
(Kießling et al. 2020; Romm 2018)
State actor labels ⬇️ engagement
(Aguerri, Santisteban, and Miró-Llinares 2022; Liang, Zhu, and Li 2022)
Tweet engagement in far-right networks ⬆️ since October 2022
(Barrie 2022)
Sources: DFRLab, Twitter, Internet Archive
After Twitter’s removal of profile labels on April 21st, 2023…
| Type | Attribute | Signals |
|---|---|---|
| Perceived | Source characteristics | profile labels, disclosed affiliations, account type, verification badges |
| Persuasive | Source behavior | post frequency, topic diversity, other content-based features |
After Twitter officially removed labels from state actors’ accounts…
State actors with high credibility will be less responsive to platform changes.
1,177 accounts linked to Chinese, Iranian, and Russian state actors
Proxy for accounts that had government and state-affiliated media labels
twarc CLI
Tweet timeline endpoint; up to ~3,200 tweets per account
Collected ~2.5 million tweets from 1,038 timelines
Per-day metrics 📈
Placebo Tests—Engagement and Tweet Volume
Retweets
RTs of media accounts ⬆️
RTs of Russian accounts ⬆️
Likes
⬆️ likes of Russian accounts compared to Chinese/Iranian accounts
Tweets by state actors
⬆️ tweets by media accounts
⬆️ tweets by Russian and Chinese accounts
Credibility
| China | Iran | Russia | |
| Perceived | ❌ | ❌ | ⬆️ |
| Persuasive | ⬆️ | ❌ | ⬆️ |
koh@hertie-school.org
https://allisonkoh.github.io/
🟦 @allisonwkoh
Source: Rest of World, Lumen Database